Website: http://thefirestillburning.wordpress.com
Profile: I am a physicist with a musician wife and a daughter who got the best of both of us. I am a 3rd generation RLDS member who prefers to reserve the modern term of Community of Christ for something bigger and more permanent than a religious denomination. I am someone who is grateful for all who seek to be faithful, as they understand faithfulness, in fulfilling their role in that Community. I am a writer of occasional scientific and religious papers and many, many, many reports, plans, forecasts, speeches, and proposals destined to be seen only by government bureaucrats and their political supervisors.
At the end of April, Community of Christ released to the church at large a “Draft Statement on Sexual Ethics” for public review and invited comments to be made by e-mail to the First Presidency. This Statement will be considered by the International Leaders Council (which has no strict equivalent in the LDS) in May [...]
Community of Christ is attempting to form a tradition — now that its World Conferences are held every three years instead of at six month intervals as is customary in LDS practice — of having its Prophet address the church in non-Conference years in something of a “state of the church” address. Community of Christ [...]
Community of Christ does not follow its LDS cousins in having secret temple rituals. So I read last week’s post by Bored in Vernal, on the “Sacred Embrace As Five Points of Fellowship” with the curiosity of one who has never even been inside an LDS Temple. Much of the terminology was unfamiliar to me [...]
“Liberals have difficulty understanding the Tea Party because they think it is a bunch of selfish racists. But I think the Tea Party is driven in large part by concerns about fairness. It’s not fairness as equality of outcome. It’s fairness as karma — the idea that good deeds lead to good outcomes, and bad [...]
Science knows that the Norse (Vikings) colonized Greenland a millennium ago, but the colony didn’t stick when colder temperatures returned following the Medieval Warm Period. Average daily temperatures in Greenland warmed about 3 degrees F before the plunge back into a Little Ice Age (which itself only ended well into the 19th Century) that forced [...]
I still contend I was not being insensitive — just naive. I arrived on the East Coast in 1973 — freshly out of grad school — having been selected for the one job at John Hopkins Applied Physics Lab I’d wanted more than any other I’d even considered applying for. After my church had canonized [...]
One of my guilty pleasures is watching the TV show “Alaska State Troopers” on the National Geographic Channel. The pleasure part comes from seeing spectacular scenery and wildlife like moose and bears I’ll never be able to visit in real life. However, the guilty part comes because most episodes also pose the question as to [...]
How does knowing you’re supposed to grow up being part of the “aristocracy” affect a political candidate’s ability to connect with everyday people? In elementary school in the 1950′s, we used to be given as “enrichment” a little news magazine called the Weekly Reader tailored toward stories on current events that would appeal to children. [...]
The laws that govern normal behavior on earth (e.g., “Thou shalt not kill”) do not apply in heaven, because there they are unnecessary. The laws that govern normal behavior on earth also do not apply in hell, because there no one can hope to keep them. I am not the first to notice that “war [...]
Over the New Year holiday, a comment by Stephen Marsh in his own post on rent seeking reminded me of something John Dominic Crossan had talked about in his book The Historical Jesus — the parallelism between the concepts of an earthly patron in the development of the Roman Empire, and heavenly patronage as it [...]
Plan A was to have the economy humming by now and see Obama cruise to re-election on the success of Keynesian counter-cyclical stimulus. Hope and change would have proven itself superior to the failed policies of the Republican past and the country would eagerly follow Obama into yet more “transformational” policies in his second term. [...]
As I was researching a post last summer on some of the organizations that have sprung up in the stead of the RLDS movement as fundamentalist alternatives to the Community of Christ, I discovered that a childhood friend had become one of the leading officials of one such organization, the Remnant Church of Jesus Christ of [...]
Like many people who consider the Book of Mormon as scripture, I am fascinated by questions about where it has a setting in ancient historical events. I know, of course, that many other people hold it as Scripture, but are content to see it as having no origin prior to a set of 19th Century visionary [...]
“Only two of the 18 launched lifeboats rescued people after the ship sank. Lifeboat 4 was close by and picked up five people, two of whom later died. Close to an hour later, lifeboat 14 went back and rescued four people, one of whom died afterward. Other people managed to climb onto the lifeboats that floated off [...]
The United States has been preoccupied with economic issues and domestic politics. So it was shocking to have the Attorney General of the United States call a news conference to announce that Iran’s government was implicated in a plot to murder the Saudi Ambassador to Washington while in the city and (from other sources) conduct [...]
I can remember making 3 bets in my life — all the result of foolish pride leading me astray. Barely above the age of accountability at the time of the first bet, I was sitting in my kitchen while my mother gave me a haircut when she made some terribly offensive remark about how cute [...]
“Finally have put a finger on an issue I have with the priesthood of this church. A lot of you want us to embrace, uphold, accept and defend the practicing homosexual. Why is it that because I do not agree with you that you try to paint me as hateful to everyone else?” Thus began [...]
I tend to be overly in awe of the grandeur of nature anytime, but having a once-per-hundred-plus year earthquake and a once-per-fifty-year straight-up-the-Atlantic-coastline hurricane track brush my home within a six day period has only amplified that tendency. Neither event was strong here in the sense that many of you have probably experienced a hurricane [...]
“For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” That’s a somewhat simplistic, but nevertheless effective way to teach the law of conservation of momentum, and I think there’s actually some metaphorical version of that law which applies to churches. When someone leaves a church, his/her absence allows/pushes the church that remains to go [...]
As an insulin-dependent diabetic for more than 47 years, I’ve had to become far more familiar with numbers measuring my medical condition than I’d ever wanted. By my teenage years, I knew what glucose readings meant in regard to how soon and what I had to eat, or how much insulin I needed to inject, [...]
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